


remember the fight and forget the pain

by choomchoom



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Tacos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-30
Updated: 2018-05-30
Packaged: 2019-05-16 05:13:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14805041
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/choomchoom/pseuds/choomchoom
Summary: Lup comes home.Set immediately after Lup gets her body back. She, Barry, and Taako enjoy a meal to celebrate.





	remember the fight and forget the pain

**Author's Note:**

> i finished listening to balance arc yesterday and i'm super not okay. hope you enjoy this little story about people who saved the world trying to relearn normalcy.
> 
> title is from Walk the Moon's One Foot (such a Lup song!). Rated for language.

Taako was in the midst of tasting the sauce he’d made when the front door of the house slammed open with a crack so loud that it made him wonder if the doorframe had broken. The spoon he’d been using to grab a sample of the sauce flew across the room as he reached instinctively for his wand.

He was still in the process of drawing it out, and the spoon hadn’t yet hit the floor, when steps that had started out near the door grew louder and louder until Lup skidded to a stop at the entrance to the kitchen.  She looked around the kitchen as Taako put the pieces together and hastily stashed his wand back in his pocket and the spoon finally hit the floor behind him, sending drops of spicy sauce flying.

Lup was already laughing as she bounded forward and pulled Taako into a bone-crushing hug, which he returned without comment. After a few seconds, she ruined the moment as expected by muttering “I hope you didn’t need whatever’s on the floor over there, you spaz.”

“If you broke my doorframe I’m putting it on your tab,” Taako bit back, with as much annoyance as he could muster for someone who was still clinging to him after not being hugged for twelve years.

Barry finally appeared at the kitchen door as well, smiling slightly at the scene in front of him. Lup seemed to sense him and finally let go of Taako, pulling back so that she was able to smile her brilliant smile at both of them at once. “So what’s cooking? I’d say it smells pretty decent, but I haven’t smelled anything in twelve years so I’m not sure how it measures up to reality.”

Taako took the hint and took out plates, then grabbed the prewarmed tortillas from the oven. “If the same’s true for taste, I won’t waste these on you. There’s bread and jam in the cupboard.”

Lup cackled at that, then picked up a spoon and started reaching toward the pot of sauce. Taako took a second away from plating to bat her hand away. “No! That’s cheating! You’ll get the full experience or you’ll get nothing.” He tried to soften the words by pressing the first completed plate into her hands. It would be Lup’s first meal in all the time she’d been in her Litch form, and her first taco _ever_ , so Taako had gone all out with preparing what Joaquin had called ‘the full Tex-Mex experience.’ There were tacos of beef and potato drizzled in spicy sauce, and sides of rice, beans, mild salsa, and sour cream (that part he _had_ , he maintained, managed to figure out on his own).

Lup didn’t bother with any more ribbing before taking an enthusiastic bite. Taako paused in preparing Barry’s plate to watch her reaction. It was worth it. He wasn’t sure how much of the absolute joy on her face was from being able to eat after not having had a corporal form for all this time, and how much was from the masterful preparation of the dish itself, but she looked happy, and that was all that really mattered.

Of course, her “This is _amazing_ , Taako! What’s it called?” mid-mouthful certainly didn’t hurt.

Taako passed a plate to Barry and started making one for himself as he gleefully launched into the story of his bizarre encounter with Joaquin, which he’d been saving for exactly this moment. He’d been rehearsing it, needing a funny story to tell for his first encounter with Lup back in her corporal form. Otherwise, he’d worried that the drama of it all would catch up to them and their staying-cool-taking-things-in-stride cred would be in jeopardy.

Lup laughed at all the right moments, usually with disgusting mouthfuls of taco showing themselves, and Barry chuckled too, but otherwise just ate his tacos and didn’t contribute. None of them had had an easy time adjusting after saving the world, but no one else had been nearly as overt about it as Barry, who never seemed to sleep and called each of them in turn on their stones of far speech at increasingly improbable times of night to ramble about some new aspect of the science and magic that was now keeping the Hunger trapped outside their planar system. Taako never _worried_ , but there was the smallest of chances that he might have been…concerned. Hopefully having Lup back for real and starting that new job with Kravitz would put Barry back on an even keel.

After all the tacos had been consumed, silence fell for a moment. Suddenly, there was nothing else to say that didn’t have to do with the obscenely intense horrors and triumphs of the past hundred and twelve years.

So Taako jumped up to grab the second part of his preparation for this evening—a bottle of Grey Goose and three crystal shot glasses. If ignoring the drama wasn’t going to work, maybe they would need to indulge it a little. And Taako wasn’t Taako from TV because he was _undramatic._

Lup and Barry were both silent as he poured the shots, filling the glasses to the brim. Lup smirked fully at that, but Barry’s expression got slightly more nervous than usual. Well, Taako was going to wipe that right off his face.

He set the bottle down with an unnecessarily definitive _thunk_ and picked up one of the glasses, holding it expertly between two fingers, not spilling a drop. Lup and Barry followed suit, though Barry did manage to spill a little puddle onto the table.

Since Taako could be a very, very nice person sometimes, he didn’t comment on that. “To our lives,” he said. “May they be long and joyful, may we _please_ keep the disappearing and dying to a minimum. And by minimum, I mean zero.” He looked straight at Lup. “Don’t do it.” He raised his glass a little higher. “To Lup.” He drank it down smoothly, chasing it with a glass of soda from the table.

“To Lup,” Barry repeated, looking at her with a passion that Taako could barely conceive of before downing his own shot.

Lup shrugged with the shoulder that wasn’t carefully holding the shot glass up. “Fuck it. To me!” Taako couldn’t hide his grin as she downed her shot, without chasing it, and slammed the glass down on the table.

Then she coughed. “Fuck!” she said, between suddenly tearing eyes. Taako burst out laughing as he pushed his soda over to her, and as she took a hearty gulp of it. When she emerged, she was laughing too and wiping her eyes. “Forgot what shots were like,” she said, still teary. She pulled the bottle toward herself and started refilling glasses. “I’m gonna make up for that. My turn.”

Taako let her fill the glasses, leaning back against his chair as he felt the alcohol work its way through his body. It would be okay. Things weren’t quite stable yet, but they would be.

Lup raised her glass, splashing a few drops onto the table in her enthusiasm. “To tacos!”  


End file.
